Searching the Past to Understand the Future

ZOMG Teh Menz!

02/05/2013

So back when I wrote my Being Me posts and then wandered off into the weeds with stuff that annoyed me about the internet I thought I’d wrap it all up with a post about bullying as an act of enforcing conformity. My general, overarching point was that anyone can become a bully. All it takes is attempting to force other people to conform to a specific notion of what it means to be a [insert group here]. The bullied sometimes become the bullies when they get power. It’s a tic of human nature, basically.

The solution to bullying, I’ve come to believe, is to say, “I am [insert label here] and you don’t get to define that for me.” Alternately, in the case of some bullies – such as MRAs, who compelled me to write a recent post – the solution is to say, “I don’t give a shit what you think, since your labels are stupid and don’t apply to me. Or reality.” It helps when people outside that specific situation then come alongside and help people see the bigger picture. This idea was basically the genesis of Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project, to name a famous example.

The last couple days an interesting thing has been happening over at Scalzi’s place that illustrates my point way better than the post I never wrote would have. A fellow Scalzi refers to as the Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit (RSHD for short, because Scalzi has no urge to use his real name or link to him) has been talking all kinds of shit about Scalzi for the last few months using fairly standard MRA bullshit. This resulted in a lot of trolls heading over to Whatever and annoying the hell out of Scalzi. Scalzi doesn’t seem to like being annoyed by trolls that much. So he did something about it.

Specifically, he pledged to donate money to organizations pushing for equality every time the RSHD mentioned him, capped out at a grand. That’s where the internet took over, specifically the bit where Scalzi is one of the true mensches of the internet and has one hell of a following. Other people started pledging, too. By the end of the day the pledges were over $20,000. By now, three days later, the pledges are at over $50,000.

That’s pretty much amazing. It’s a whole lot of people standing up and saying, “We don’t want your bullying. But we’re going to make something good come out of it and make you look like an ass in the process.” It won’t stop the RSHD, since he seems to get off on shit like this, but this sort of thing isn’t directed at the RSHD. It’s directed at observers to show that there are those who are willing to stand up to the bullies. It’s also intended to show that the bullies themselves are absurd and can be effectively ignored.

It seems to be working, too. Scalzi got a write-up in the freaking Guardian. And the Guardian article called the RSHD a “Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit.” It also didn’t use the RSHD’s real name nor did it link to his blog(s). It’s brilliant, really.

Scalzi also commissioned some art. See, MRAs use the (largely discredited) notion of Alpha and Beta males to make sure everyone knows they’re the alphas and everyone who isn’t exactly like them is a beta or a gamma or whatever and, therefore, inferior. There are also animal themes in there for some reason. Scalzi’s solution was to say, “Hey, in your taxonomy I’m a Gamma Rabbit. That sounds like an awesome thing to be, since I’m happy.”

That’s the only way to approach people who try to call you inferior but whose only power is with words. Take away the power of those words and you stymie the bullying.

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I figured out who the RSHD was almost immediately. Spend any time on the internet paying attention to MRAs and one name pops up a lot: Vox Day, aka Theodore Beale. He’s harassed PZed and Ed Brayton over the years, who are also a couple of guys who don’t let bullies use them as chew toys. They have a different, significantly less whimsical style, though.

I checked over at Pharyngula to see if PZed had anything to say, mostly out of curiosity. What he had was a link to a Jim Hines post about Beale running for President of the SFWA, an organization for speculative fiction authors which has been headed by one John Scalzi for the last couple of years. I find that notion fascinating.

If you go back to my previous MRA post about an idiot who went after Fred it occurs to me that the entire reason anyone becomes a bully, especially an internet bully, is because they’re deeply unhappy. So they define themselves according to some scale where they can show the world (themselves, mostly) how amazing they are). Seeing someone who doesn’t use their scale but who is also obviously content with the world must, then, be absolutely awful.

That’s basically why Scalzi keeps saying that Vox has a mancrush on him. I’m not saying that Vox Day is a deeply self-loathing closet case (mostly because I have endeavored to know as little about him as possible). I’m saying that Vox Day is a great example of a deeply self-loathing bully who keeps trying to find meaning by emulating the path and then destroying the happiness of others. That must be an awful way to live.

01/29/2013

I’ve had a The Single Life and/or a ZOMG! Teh Menz post a-brewin’ for a while. The problem is that it’s entirely based on me responding to articles, several of which I read about a month ago. So it’s all getting a bit jumbled about in my head. That’s fun, though, right?

What’s going to end up happening here, though, is I’m just going to put up a bunch of links.

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People love writing about online dating. I’m no different, I suppose. I’ve written a bunch of posts about online dating. I haven’t written any lately, though, mostly because my ability to care about the whole thing is rather limited at the moment. Still, I’m always interested when other people write about it online dating. Mostly because about half of the articles end up being hilariously wrong or misguided.

See, Ludlow’s article was all about how online dating has commoditized dating. I actually wrote about thatexact same thing many, many months ago. One of the big problems that humans have is dealing with a situation where there are too many choices. One of the other big problems that humans have is dealing with a situation where several of the available choices are pie-in-the-sky fantasy, at best. Too many pie-in-the-sky fantasy choices could be the name of the next big online dating site.

I would never make a claim, however, that online dating destroys commitment, either in theory or in practice. I think I was pretty clear in my own musings about online dating that I was going in with incorrect attitudes and presuppositions and that I was pretty damaged. All online dating does is allow damaged people to meet other damaged people they wouldn’t otherwise meet and spread the misery farther and faster.

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I read the Dan Slater article next, pretty much in the spirit of an anecdote that Ludlow then jumped off of with a sort of detached journalism. As such, I didn’t immediately notice that there were…shall we say, problems with the Slater article.

Last week, Dan Slater at the Atlantic wrote what may be the worst piece on online dating I’ve ever read, which is a truly remarkable feat in such a competitive field. Slater’s theory is that because online dating sites are a magical wonderland where men can meet and fuck an endless array of women, it means men will have no desire to get married and thus will be the ruin of marriage. If I were married to Dan Slater, I would get a lawyer on retainer now, because there’s projection all over this thing. And let’s be clear: Slater means men. He claims “people”, but as Alexis Madrigal (who, if you’re rushing to disagree with him, I should point out is male, so you might want to slow your roll, trolls) points out in the same publication, Slater didn’t bother to interview any women, much less any men that have a different experience from his buddy Jacob.

This is the second paragraph from Alexis’s article:

Narratively, the story focuses on Jacob, an overgrown manchild jackass who can't figure out what it takes to have a real relationship. The problem, however, is not him, and his desire for a "low-maintenance" woman who is hot, young, interested in him, and doesn't mind that he is callow and doesn't care very much about her. No, the problem is online dating, which has shown Jacob that he can have a steady stream of mediocre dates, some of whom will have sex with him.

That pretty much sums up Dan Slater’s article in a nutshell.

One of the real big problems with anyone who writes an article about online dating that’s primarily from one person’s perspective is that that one person might be wrong about a lot of things. I include myself in this. I don’t offer myself as a paragon of people who have experienced online dating, since I freely admit that I was kind of being a major asshole a lot of the time. Yeah, I might have just met some crazy people, but I probably didn’t do a damn thing to help myself, either.

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So yesterday Amanda Marcotte offered up the diametric opposite of the “guy who just wants to get laid” article with the “woman who desperately wants to get married” article. Those are also fun. Amanda offered her thoughts as a counterpoint to Jill over at Feministe and, for the record, I can’t be arsed to read the original article, since I really don’t care. What I want to highlight is something Amanda points out that is a fascinating underlying assumption of all of these sorts of articles:

Now, I’m not married and don’t want to be, in no small part because the institutional nature of marriage leads directly to this kind of thinking, wherein “spouse” is a job you want filled instead of an outgrowth of your love for another person. But there’s definite ideological argument of gender underpinning these stereotypes of why women and men marry. Basically, the implication is that real love between men and women is a myth. This fits into a larger sexist belief that men and women are “opposites” who put up with each other out of necessity, but who don’t really like each other very much. Believers in this believe that women need men, who are their social superiors, to choose them and validate them. (Being unchosen is considered a fate worse than death, which is why so many conservatives think that it’s a game winner to “argue” that feminists are just unchosen women who are bitter about our lack of validation from men—validation that is our sole purpose in existing, apparently.) In exchange for validating a woman’s right to exist by choosing her, a man gets someone to look after him and his home, provide him regular sex, and have children that will be named after him.

A while back I went on several dates with a woman. She was intelligent and accomplished. She also seemed to be quite well prepared for the whole settling down thing and decided that I was the one to do that.

My problem there was pretty simple: I just wasn’t that into her. I tried to convince myself to change my mind, but I couldn’t[1] bring myself to that. One of the interesting things about the way my mind works is that I draw pretty quick and accurate conclusions and then I spend about six months ignoring those conclusions until everything shakes out.

So what happened was I walked away from the first date, which went pretty well, all things considered, with Sons of Bill’s “So Much for the Blues”[2] running through my head. I then proceeded to not really think about her much and act like kind of a dick the next time I saw her. In spite of that, though, she kept trying. It eventually hit the point where every interaction we had came down to a conversation about how we couldn’t get along.

It was pretty much awful.

This particular story is a bit different from the “women planning their weddings even though they’re single and will probably be single for a long-ass time” thing in that I don’t know that she was planning to plug me into a five-year plan in a marriage binder filled with clippings from Modern Bride or whatever. I bring it up, though, because it’s pretty obvious she had a plan, she decided that I was the ideal person to fill in that part of the plan, and she didn’t notice that I was very much not on board. Then, even though I pretty much played the role of major dickhead, she still tried to get me to play that role.

I think this is the danger of seeing relationships as a job and the potential job applicants as being interchangeable. You ignore the person in front of you for the person who is in your head filling the role you think they should fill. It’s a good way to get yourself hurt and end up developing extremely negative opinions of your fellow humans.

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[1]Protip: don’t do that. Seriously, if something isn’t right, even if you can’t figure out why, just go with that. Life is easier that way.

[2]For those who don’t know, it’s basically a song about a guy breaking up with a girl and not giving a shit. Because he’s a total dick. And now he’s going to write a song about it, because breaking someone’s heart to write a song is a worthwhile trade. It also includes some of my favorite lyrics ever:

Yeah I wish I could write a song like Townes Van ZandtThen I could be a son of a bitch and no one would give a damnAnd I just keep telling myself that no one understands

01/17/2013

I suppose it’s possible that most MRAs on the internet are all just extremely skilled and subtle satirists attempting to offer a display of exactly what it looks like when an overly testosteroned bully crawls so far up his own ass that he can no longer breathe through all the shit. Somehow, though, I doubt that’s the case. I doubt that’s the case, specifically, because every time I run into an MRA he’s so very serious and mean-spirited that I can’t believe he has enough human empathy to actually engage in satire. So either every MRA is dead serious, every MRA is a pitch perfect satirist, or all MRAs are one or the other. I’m forced to assume that it’s the first option, mostly because satirizing that sort of bullshit would be exhausting.

I bring this up because of Fred Clark over at Slacktivist. See, a couple of years ago he got married to a woman who already had kids from a previous marriage. From time to time he writes about his adopted daughters and gives off the impression that 1.) he’s adjusted to fatherhood quite well, thankyouverymuch and that 2.) he’s rather proud of his adopted daughters and pretty much treats them as if they were his own. He is, in short, a mensch in this just as much as he is in pretty much everything else he does.

I think that Fred’s example here is important. A couple of months ago I tossed in a bit about my realization that at 31 I was seriously limiting my dating options with my blanket ban on single mothers. This is a phenomenon that we as a society will have to deal with more and more, as there are a lot of people out there who have kids and are also not in committed, long-term relationships with their co-parent.

This isn’t a problem from a moral standpoint. This is, however, a problem from a logistical and emotional standpoint. Getting into a relationship is, by itself, fraught with complications. Getting into a relationship with someone who has kids through another person is far, far more complicated.

I actually tossed a question about the whole thing into a post a couple months ago. It was a thought experiment because I’ve run up against the problem a couple of times and I’d thought about it but hadn’t actually put myself into a position to deal with it. So I solicited advice. I got a comment from Mike Timonin that was definite food for thought:

The thing you need to keep in mind in regard to kids in a family is that families are exponential, not additive. So, if you meet someone and form a relationship (any relationship, but let's assume romantic for the moment), that 2 - your relationship with hir and hir relationship with you. Add a kid (or any other person - poly relationships are complicated in the same way) and you're not just adding one new relationship, but 3 - the kid's relationship with their parent, the kid's relationship with you, and the kid's relationship with your relationship with hir parent. So, it's complicated. You need to consider how you feel about the mom, and about the kid, and about how your relationship with the mom will affect the parent-child relationship and so on.

It was really thoughtful and I meant to respond to it at the time, but, um, I didn’t. Mostly because I’m easily distracted by – hey! Look! A squirrel!

I actually think that Mike understated the problem. If you get into a relationship with someone who has a kid you have to manage your relationship with that person. You have to manage your relationship with that kid. You have to be aware of how they relate to each other. You also have to be aware of the fact that you now have a relationship with the biological parent with whom you are not in a relationship. You also now have two sets of biological grandparents and you have to deal with the fact that you’ve now made your own family into a collection of in-laws and grandparents, aunts, and/or uncles. It’s all crazy go nuts, basically.

You also don’t get an easy mode. I’ve spent most of the last decade in easy mode and, I’ve got to tell you, it’s been pretty easy. If I want to sit around and drink beer and watch TV and not give a shit about anything I can. If I want to go on a couple dates with someone somewhere I can. Since I’ve mostly been dealing with women who are also childless I’ve been able to make and break last-minute plans without too much difficulty.

Bring someone with a kid into that and it’s totally different. At least, I’d assume it’s different. I mean, I have a dog. I can’t go anywhere without putting some amount of thought into the question of, “What will I do with Daisy?” If I’m going to the store I just let her run around and play with her toys. If I’m going to be gone for a few hours I have to crate her. If I’m going to be gone longer I have to make arrangements to take her somewhere. You can’t leave a child alone for any length of time (or, at least, you can’t do it without risking a visit from your friendly neighborhood DCFS case worker). So something as simple as a coffee date ends up being a major investment (at least, I assume).

If I were to date someone with a kid I’d have to be aware of that and sensitive to it. If it were to get more serious than a couple dates and then an, “I don’t think we’re really compatible,” I’d then have to be willing and able to incorporate this woman and also her offspring and also all of the baggage that comes with this woman and her offspring into my life. That might be a major sacrifice on my part, too. Am I dealing with someone who has an actively involved father who pays alimony or am I suddenly taking on the burden of paying for all the kid’s needs when I’m accustomed to blowing my extra money on craft beer and chicken schwarma at Naf Naf? Am I going to have to start putting my pita money towards a college fund?

Am I, in short, prepared to be both a boyfriend/husband and father when last week I wasn’t sure if I was even ready to be a boyfriend?

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I bring all of this stuff up because I saw one of the most absolutely dickish things ever at Fred’s place last week. He’s been doing this ongoing series called “Chick-fil-A Biblical Family of the Day” in which he copies passages of the Bible about families that look nothing like the Cleavers from Leave it to Beaver. The whole thing is a satire on the concept of “Biblical families” pushed by Evangelical Christians as an attempt to fight against things they don’t like by saying, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”

Are we really supposed to take family advice from an unemployed mangina raising a fitter man's seed? I bet you even think your wife's not cheating on you.

Everything about that comment set off every single one of the various, “Oh, holy hell, what kind of an asshole are you?” alarms in my head. Several commenters called him out for it, but a couple asked if he was responding to Fred’s post or Fred himself. At that point Eric the Red proved that, yes, he’s a complete and total shitheel:

Of course I was talking about Fred. Truly did Heartiste speak correctly of his kind (and the other snivelling manboobs here) when he said:

Your typical outrage feminist and limp-wristed manboob flirts dangerously close to the monster threshold. Humans recoil from manjawed, mustachioed, beady-eyed, actively aggressive women and chipmunk-cheeked, bitch tittied, curvaceously plush, passive-aggressive men as if they were the human equivalent of dog shit. The farther your feminist or manboob deviates from the normal human template, in physical and psychological form, the more monstrous it becomes to the average person.

Now imagine you stomp through life as one of these howling feminists or putrid nancyboys, like Grendel disturbed by the sights and sounds of normalcy all around him. You sense, in your darkest secret thoughts, that most people are repulsed by you, want to have nothing to do with you, would be embarrassed to be seen with you. How do you think that would affect your mental state? First, you would seek out others like you. Monstrosity loves company. Then, you would lash out at anything normal, elevating the wicked and deviant while eroding confidence in the good and beautiful, twisting cherished moral standards that work adequately to sustain a normal population into bizarre, exaggerated facsimiles manufactured solely to do the bidding of your freak cohort.

So…first of all…all of the italicized word salad is something Eric the Red was quoting from somewhere else. I’m not going to include the link, since, well, fuck that misogynistic asshole, that’s why. But, seriously, this guy is a total and unrepentant shitheel. And the guy he quoted with much admiration has all of the writing ability of a brain-damaged orangutan who has been handed a smartphone with a particularly glitchy autocorrect.

That said, there’s a certain horrible beauty to the awkwardly strung together words above. It’s almost a form of beat poetry, really. I imagine John Lithgow would do amazing work with “Then, you would lash out at anything normal, elevating the wicked and deviant while eroding confidence in the good and beautiful, twisting cherished moral standards that work adequately to sustain a normal population into bizarre, exaggerated facsimiles manufactured solely to do the bidding of your freak cohort.” It’s not exactly a Newt Gingrich press release, but it’s still potentially pretty in its self-important incoherence.

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I think it’s important to talk about things like this. Divorce is a reality in our world. Extra-marital sex resulting in pregnancy is a reality in our world. Single parents are a reality in our world.

Those single parents, whether they had sex outside of marriage, got divorced, or had to bury their biological co-parent, meanwhile, shouldn’t be expected to suddenly stop looking to love and be loved. To expect that is folly. To mock someone who then decides to love a single parent and invite that person and that person’s kid(s) and all of the complications of biological parents and grandparents and all of that into their life a lesser being is the height of unabashed assholery. It’s also an admission on the part of the mocker that they don’t have anything close to the level of character of the person they’re mocking.

Of course using the word “mangina” in all seriousness is also the height of unabashed assholery. But that’s a story for another day.

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It’s one of those things that goes back to my discussions of bullying and my theory that people end up choosing between empathy and resentment and that choice guides how they react to others. The example offered by Eric the Red above is obviously one of someone who has chosen resentment. It’s weird, too, since he obviously reads Fred’s stuff enough to know that Fred is currently unemployed and the husband of a woman who has children from a previous relationship. That means that he’s been sitting there, seething in his resentment about Fred for a while. That’s pretty sad, really.

There’s another level where it fascinates me. When I ask whether I could date a woman who already has a kid the question basically boils down to this: am I a good enough person to deal with this? Could I drop my basic self-absorption and accept a whole constellation of complications into my life without switching from empathy and love to resentment and hatred?

It seems to me that mocking someone who has made that choice and calling him a lesser being for doing so is a pretty good way to advertise that you’re a pretty massive jackhole.

01/14/2013

Oh. Look. I’m still talking about feminism. Hoo-freaking-ray. Very well. Let’s to it. Oh, and be warned, there’s probably some potentially (hopefully) minor triggering discussion of rape and other forms of violence down there.

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I started poking around on feminist blogs around the same time I was starting to poke around on atheist blogs. The Venn diagram overlap on the whole atheist/feminist thing was pretty big for me, so it made a certain amount of sense to do exactly that. I tended to not comment, though, since being a commenter on a feminist blog seemed like a really good way to get your throat jumped on for saying something wrong that you didn’t even know was wrong.

That, in retrospect, was probably a good thing. I kept going back to certain blogs and I knew there were certain bloggers who would have interesting things to say about whatever the topic at hand was. I didn’t feel that I had to contribute at all, though. I showed up, I read, and I thought about what the blogger had to say. Sometimes I stuck around long enough to read the comments and see what other people had to say. Mostly, though, the key point is that I didn’t say anything.

I think this is the great weakness of the whole Web 2.0 experience. Most people naturally pay more attention to what they want to say in response to something than the thing that they’re responding to. That little box at the bottom that says, “Write your thoughts here, brosef!” shrieks out its Siren call and shorts out the part of the brain that is willing to sit quietly and listen, assuming that they didn’t actively strangle that part of their brain in grade school, of course.

That’s why you see so many comments on blogs that say things like, “You’re the worst writer in the world. Why do you keep doing this?” The other variation is, “Why are you writing about this? I prefer it when you write about this other thing.”[1] There is literally nothing easier in the world than not reading an article on the internet. I do it all the fucking time. In fact right at this very moment there are millions of articles on the internet that I’m not reading. Yet for some people the urge to go to some random article on the internet and tell the person writing it that, hey, they’re totally gonna start not reading the articles all up in this place starting a week from next Tuesday if they don’t start shaping up and writing ten thousand words about the glory that is the little dwarf guy on Game of Thrones and what he would sound like if he was calling NCAA basketball games alongside Dick Vitale is completely irresistible.[3]

Things get a whole hell of a lot worse when the sort of brain-dead simpleton who doesn’t understand that other people are allowed to have a different opinion end up on a feminist blog. And holy hell, do those brain-dead simpletons end up on feminist blogs. Here, I’ll let Amanda Marcotte and Natalie Reilly explain.

I quickly learned to (theoretically) run for the (hypothetical) hills when I ran across certain terms. The big ones were “rape culture,” “privilege,” and “mansplain.” Oh, god, how I hated seeing the world “mansplain.” It was the most aggravating possible word because it was the word that got pulled out when it was time to say, “Shut up, man, you have nothing valid to say.” You’ll note that I very specifically do not say it was the word that came out when I guy was attempting to do his best imitation of an entire bag of dicks. You also might want to note that I throw the word “privilege” around on a fairly regular basis and that I recently used the term “rape culture” quite a bit in a way that indicates that I am well and truly not on board with that sort of shenanigan. So what gives?

The problem, as I alluded to before, was that I came into the whole “lurking at feminist blogs” space from a position where I didn’t really have a strong sense of what was going on or a comprehensive thought about the whole thing beyond my basic “women are people, too,” thing. For the most part I believe that the whole “women are people, too” attitude is enough. As far as a general, all-around standard for living and working and generally interacting with women goes, simply being aware of the fact that women are people and, therefore, deserving of being treated as people and not, say, interchangeable mobile sex toys, is all you really need. If you want to go any deeper than that you need (and, by extension, I needed) to go much, much further beyond that point to a place of true understanding and unfortunately the first couple stages into that journey are the hardest and most likely to be annoying.

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I think there are three levels of what I will call political correctness in speech.

The first level is the, “We’re not gonna be PC here,” level of general jackassery. That’s where you get the people who say, “I’m going to say this extremely offensive thing because it pisses off all of the right people and makes everyone think I’m a big, tough culture warrior.” This is where you get the people who (most likely intentionally) ask, “Why can’t I use the n-word even though those black rappers get to use it all the time?” These are people who understand words only at the level of how to use them as weapons. They’re assholes.

The second level is the people who understand that, say, it’s not okay to use the n-word and there’s a really good reason for it. They get that saying racist or sexist things is bad mojo and they try to avoid it because it’s a bad idea in general and it’s the sort of thing that will create an unnecessary level of social stigma. Most people, I think, are in this second category. Some are well-intentioned people who don’t want to be offensive assholes. Some aren’t well-intentioned people who don’t want to seem like offensive assholes. At times it can be hard to distinguish between the two, though, since the words that cannot be used are often esoteric and weird and the rules come out of nowhere. Also, they’re often likely to seem really arbitrary to the uninitiated.[4]

When I say esoteric and weird, too, I mean that it’s sometimes something that comes across as extremely nitpicky. If you want an example go to a website where feminist-types hang out and use the word “hysterical” in a sentence. Hysterical is one of those words that’s become commonplace in the English language to describe something that’s just a totally crazy reaction to something,[5] usually in a negative way. Most people use the word innocently, since it’s a not-terribly-uncommon word in the English language and it's been stripped of all context about how being "hysterical" is a woman problem and a specific "women become hysterical because of their weaker constitutions and general woman-ness" problem. They don’t know there’s a problem, they mean nothing by it, and suddenly they’re being attacked by someone who wants them to know they’re the Devil.[6] That can be pretty damn confusing.

The third level is the people who have really, truly thought through words and the implications of said words. Or, in reality, they’ve thought through a bunch of words and, in doing so have opened themselves to the possibility that a word they use today might be totally offensive to someone and they don’t even know it. It’s hard to be a person who does this. I’d say that it’s also probably impossible to be a person who does this 100% of the time. Hell, I’d say anything over the 75% range is pretty damn good.

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Anyway, what was my point? Oh, yeah, mansplaining. To the uninitiated, that’s a portmanteau of “man” and “explain” and generally means, “a man who shows up and explains how the world really works to those silly-headed wimminz.” That word annoyed the hell out of me. It was the Swiss Army Knife of ending conversations. Some dude would wander in out of the cold and say, “Hey, I’ma let you finish, but first I think you need to know…” Someone else would then be all, “Mansplainer! How dare you mansplain to me in your mansplaining way with your smarmy mansplaininess!” Everything would then proceed in an orderly counterclockwise motion down the shitter (unless it happened in the southern hemisphere, at which point it would be a clockwise motion. Also, feel free to berate me for my anti-antipodean bias in the comments).

What I eventually figured out (I guess, since I’m talking about it) was that the guys accused of mansplaining were completely and totally violating the most simple precept of my proto-feminism. They weren’t really behaving in a fashion that indicated they believed that women were, in fact, people. Rather, they were treating women as inferiors who didn’t get it and needed someone to show up and explain to them how things actually worked. The annoyance on the part of the women in that situation suddenly made a whole hell of a lot more sense.

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The problem here is that men so completely and totally own the conversation space in this area that most men don’t even notice it. This gets back to the whole privilege thing. As a white male I am seen as the default viewpoint for everything from gender relations to politics to television programming, mostly because the people sharing that viewpoint are either also white males or some sort of not-white and/or not-male person who has been conditioned to speak in white male-ese. I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think it should be a thing. I’m also generally blind to my own privilege because it’s simply a default way of looking at the world that I share with a disturbingly large majority of the people in the United States and Europe and also much of the rest of the world due to the legacy of European colonialism.

So if I were to go to, say, a feminist blog and see that the writer is making an argument about how the world works that I just don’t see my initial response might be to argue. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with disagreeing and sharing an opinion. Where the problem comes in is when I show up and say, “Oh, no, you’re totally wrong because you don’t understand how the world works. Lemme explain it to you.”

The simple fact of the matter is that doing that in any context is arrogant. It’s also stupid. In any case where I’m interacting with a woman of similar intelligence and cultural background and we’re discussing, say, music as non-musicians we’re probably on equal footing. If we’re discussing auto repair and she’s never opened the hood of a car I probably know more than she does. If we’re discussing what a woman has to think about as she’s walking down the street she knows way, way more than I do about it and I need to shut the fuck up and listen if I want to learn anything.

It’s really that simple. Women are people and should be treated as people. But it’s important to acknowledge the reality that women operate in a world that gives them a different set of rules and challenges than men. It’s stupid, for instance, to go to a female friend and say, “What does it mean when a woman [insert cliché question men ask women, generally in the context of dating]?” The appropriate answer is generally, “I don’t know, why don’t you ask her, since there’s no such thing as a universal language of women.” To turn that around and say, “There’s no such thing as a generic woman, therefore no women have ever actually had to worry about rape or job discrimination,” is really fucking stupid, too.

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The worst part about all of this, at least in what I’ve observed, is that the place this is most contentious is when the conversation turns to sexual violence. This goes back to my assertion that there are only a small number of predatory assholes out there, but that the small minority preys upon guys who aren’t predators but who also really don’t get what’s going on the multiply their numbers and their influence. This is where we get around to the whole concept of rape culture.

In my observation it works like this:

Woman: I have to be on guard against rapists at all times by doing [insert list of things here]. It’s exhausting and I wish it wasn’t that way.

Man: Well I’m not a rapist so you don’t have to be that way around me.

Woman: You might not be, but I don’t know that yet so I still have to be on guard.

Man: You’re calling me a rapist? How dare you!

Woman: No, I’m not calling you a rapist. I’m saying I don’t know that you’re not a rapist and I can’t afford to take that risk.

Man: Bitch! I ain’t no rapist. You need to stop being such a bitch and learn how the world actually works outside of your feminazi fantasies.

That’s not a conversation that’s going to end well.

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Oh, and there’s an added wrinkle. Let’s say that Mr. Mansplainer above does actually turn out to be a rapist. Guess who’s going to get blamed for not taking the proper steps to watch out for her own safety? If you said the woman you win.

What do you win? Um, how about this YouTube video of No Doubt’s “Just a Girl?”

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[1]There’s a third variation on this that doesn’t really apply and is more of a Facebook phenomenon in my experience. I generally see it specifically with status updates put out by bands.

Let’s say that you follow the band Funkyfunktopus and love their new album Garage It, Bitches. You’re all about Garage It, Bitches, but you’re also all about Calling Punky Brewster’s new release Ginger Sparklepony, which is similar but different in a good way.

Whoever’s responsible for Funkyfunktopus’s Facebook page is bored. So that person puts up a status that says, “Hey, guys, looking for some new music to listen to in the van. Anybody got suggestions?” So you’re all, “Oh, hells, yeah. I’ma tell them about the wonder and merriment that is Ginger Sparklepony.” So you click to share about Calling Punky Brewster but see that there are already 12 comments.

Four of those comments are some variation on, “I’m listening to this dope-ass disc called Garage It, Bitches by some band you’ve probably never heard of.” Three of the remaining comments will have some format that’s to the effect of twelve albums followed by an, “Oh, of course, Garage It, Bitches. SMILEYFACEEMOTICON.”

I’m thinking of making a drinking game out of this. That’s because there are only two valid responses to this kind of bullshit: drink heavily or throw the laptop out the window. Oh, sure, you could stop being on Facebook forever, but who does that? Nobody, that’s who. Sure, we all threaten it once or twice a week, but you know that no one actually leaves. I mean, where else are you going to hear pointless political rants from your racist, gun hoarding uncle or find out what that guy you hung out with for three weeks in the seventh grade had for lunch (migas at that place on Grand by the old tire factory, for the record. Next week he’s gonna Instagram his cholesterol screening) today? Google+? As if, honky.

By the way, I don’t think that the word “honky” gets used enough. I’m starting a campaign, which I’m sure will be exactly as successful as my campaign to get people to use the word “Biden” to describe anything that’s a big fucking deal. Think of the synergy in that, by the way. Like, your buddy misses that once-in-a-lifetime show where Calling Punky Brewster opens up for Funkyfunktopus because he has an epic case of the shits. So you get to the finale and the lead singer of Funkyfunktopus calls the lead singer of Calling Punky Brewster onstage and then a priest shows up and they announce that they’re getting gay married right then and there because it’s all legal in Illinois now[2] and then they call you on stage and say, “It’s because of this guy telling us about each others’ band on Facebook that we’ve reached this point. And then they give you lifetime administrator privileges on their Facebook pages to kick off any asshole who responds to a request for music suggestions by telling them about themselves as if they didn’t know that they were fucking musicians and they’d put out an album recently.

So the next day you see your buddy and say to him, “Dude, you should have been there. It was a total Biden, honky.”

And your friend will be ashamed of his weakness and make sure from that day forward to get a proper amount of fiber in his diet and never travel anywhere without a metric shit ton of Imodium and Pepto.

That, my honkies, would be one hell of a Biden.

[2]Note: gay marriage not currently legal in Illinois. It will be soon, though, as long as Francis Cardinal George has nothing to do with it, which he doesn’t. Yet for some reason we can’t see a single news item about the impending Illinois gaytopia without also seeing that the beanie wearing regional director for the Church of Kiddie Fucker Protectors, Inc. wants to lecture us in an entirely boring and predictable way about how sexual immorality is bad if it involves more than one dick and both people involved are consenting adults who would really, really like to contractually join themselves together.

I would like to propose a solution to this problem. Someone should be hired to write complimentary op-eds alongside Francis Cardinal George’s boringly predictable rants. It should start simply and on topic. Like, the op-ed should be about how interracial marriage is a truly bad idea because it will convince the good (white) folks that the bad (not white) folks are people and might create children who are a combination of white and brown and who believe that there’s nothing different between white and brown people, when god obviously ordained that the white people should be burdened to use their superior brains and mint julep-drinking capabilities to tell the brown people which of their crops to raise and that they should get little money because they’re just not smart enough to understand how hard it is to sit on the porch with a lemonade and masturbate all day.

After that it should become progressively more surreal. Like, maybe the next time Francis Cardinal George tells us how gay marriage will ruin America someone can write an article about how the Brooklyn Dodgers are sure to destroy the professional baseball league with their little Jackie Robinson experiment. Then they can write about how the University of Chicago Maroons are surely mocking god’s plans by creating their farcical Big Ten Conference and the idea will never catch on.

Also, I hereby nominate myself to get this job. Since newspapers are all going out of business and probably can’t afford to pay me I’ll offer a compromise. They just have to find some way to make sure that the attractive single ladies reading know I’m “single and ready to mingle” as the kids say. And they have to put the most flattering picture ever taken of me next to my byline:

Also, I’m officially at more than a page and a half of footnote for less than half a page of post. That’s gonna end well.

[3]In the interests of full disclosure, I have absolutely no idea what the fuck I just wrote there. I do not watch Game of Thrones. I also do not watch Dick Vitale unless I’m watching a pizza commercial during some sort of non-DVRed televised sporting event. It just seemed like the sort of absurd bullshit someone would put into the comments on a blog.

[4]I’d like to point to this Scalzi bit on transgender folk as a prime example of what I’m talking about. He mentions at one point that he’s learned that the term “tranny” is offensive. Several commenters come in later and ask why it’s a problem. Someone even popped in and said that they’re a transgender person who doesn’t find the word offensive at all. I don’t consider Scalzi to be a category two person, but a category three, since he’s obviously thought long and hard about his language use and how to minimize using it in a damaging way. Even so, he admits to a blind spot. That’s where it gets complicated. Sometimes people aren’t aware. Sometimes, too, a person has an experience with someone who says, “Oh, I’m totally okay if you call me a [insert word here],” and then the person generalizes that specific interaction to everyone in [applicable group]. So they meet someone else and say, “Oh, so you’re a [word]. Awesome. My best friend in high school was one, too.” This new person reacts in horror and all of the sudden bad shit is going down.

[5]Also, too, the word “crazy” or any other word that’s a pejorative term that applies to mental health.

[6] This, by the way, delves into another one of my not-at-all favorite internet argument things. I say something someone else finds offensive. That person tells me they find it offensive. I say, “Oh, shit, sorry, I didn’t mean to cause offense and didn’t know that there was anything wrong there.” The person then pulls out the internet-catch-all response: “Intent is not magic.”

On one level it’s true. My complete lack of intent to offend you doesn’t mean that I won’t offend you by accident. On another level, though, if I didn’t actually intend to offend you and didn’t even know that what I was saying could be taken as offensive then you really ought to cut me some slack. If I keep doing it the terms should change. But ignorance should be a defense, as should simple human fallibility.

The fact of the matter is that my whole thing about people reading shit on the internet and only thinking about how they want to react cuts both ways. It applies to the dudes who don’t think women should talk about anything. It also applies to the women who want to jump all over a dude who says something that comes across as insensitive. If it’s a guy who’s obviously an asshole and who’s trolling then, by all means, have at. If it’s a guy who’s trying to say something that’s on his mind and he tosses the word “hysterical” in because, y’know, fairly common English word that’s been divorced from its original context it’s probably not the end of the world.

01/11/2013

Okay, in truth Amanda Marcotte is usually on fire. I tend to miss it, though, since she’s one of those blogger types who I only see when other people link to her. That, in and of itself, is weird, since I have Pandagon on my RSS feed. That particular issue is one of technology. Most of my RSS stuff is an actual feed that says, “Hey, look, here’s a new post by this guy.” Pandagon, or, really, Raw Story, doesn’t seem to work that way. So I tend to forget that, yes, Amanda Marcotte writes things. But then I end up hitting, like, six posts in a row, which can be kind of awesome.

That’s really too bad, since Amanda Marcotte regularly catches fire. I mean that in a good way, by the way, not a spontaneous human combustion way. Because that would be bad.

In fact, let’s make that a blanket statement: Geds thinks that it’s bad when people are actually on fire. Done.

Either way, the thing in question that causes me to make the statement in, re: Amanda Marcotte and fire is five posts in a row at Pandagon that made me say, “Hell, yeah!” Several of them are directly related to things I want to talk about with the whole feminism bit, so let’s get right down to it.

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The first time I came into contact with the notion of anything even closely resembling the term I now know as “rape culture” was out at Western Illinois University. It was a relatively innocuous flyer on the wall of my dorm next to the elevator. I have zero recollection of the exact wording on the paper but I remember the gist, which was basically, “If you have sex with someone without their consent you’re committing rape and here are indications that consent haven’t been given.” What then followed were things like, “She’s not awake,” and, “She’s too goddamn drunk to know what’s going on.”

I, it should go without saying, was not sexually active at the time. I was a good little Evangelical and being a good little Evangelical meant that I wasn’t going to have sex before marriage. Still, the whole thing struck me as being somewhat Byzantine. I mean, really, I thought, what if I was in a position where I thought consent was given, then it was followed by drunkenness and then suddenly, boom, someone is calling me a rapist?

I am now genuinely embarrassed to admit that I had thoughts like that. I am also willing to admit that I had thoughts like that because I knew fuck-all about relationships and sex and, well, women in general at the time. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. It’s also a good excuse, since I was one o’ them no sex before marriage virgins at the time, which meant that I’d never given any consideration to the notion of consent before as it wasn’t even a remotely important issue to me.

Have I mentioned that feminism wasn’t really a thing that we talked about in church?

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I stand by my theory that the MRA-types prey on guys like me. I think that in issues of sex and consent there are four general male camps: there are those who naturally don’t worry and don’t need to worry about such things because they’ve gotten laid a time or four and generally understand the difference between yes and no. There are those who don’t think about such things very often. There are those who don’t really know anything and can be swayed through their ignorance. Then there are those who are rapists or just general rape-apologizing assholes who want to muddy the whole thing up for their own nefarious purposes.

It’s that fourth category that needs to be dealt with. More importantly, it’s that fourth category’s influence on the second and third categories and, to a lesser extent, the first category that needs to be dealt with. Asshole rapists, I firmly believe, are a small minority. They need a critical mass of people in the not-asshole but also not-fully-cognizant-of-the-issue majority to hold sway in the conversation.

That’s where I get into the “Amanda Marcotte is on fire” stuff. To wit:

With all attention being paid to rape culture lately—which is good!—I’m seeing a not-so-good consequence of it, which is a number of people, some well-intentioned, perpetuating the myth that rape frequently occurs on accident. This myth has grown up in place of the discredited (though still popular) myth that women “cry rape” to cover up for their slutty choices, and it goes a little something like this:

A man and a woman drink a lot of alcohol and have drunken, consensual sex. In the morning, the woman—who, being female, is hysterical and quick to jump to conclusions—feels that she wasn’t fully consenting, so she calls the cops. The man, who innocently believed it to be a consensual encounter, gets charged with rape and sent to the clink because of the SCARY FEMINIST laws that say that women with a blood alcohol limit over X cannot consent, so any sex with them is rape. The moral of this story is that innocent men are raping women left and right because they sincerely thought they had consent, but (because of hysterical, probably anti-sex feminists) drunk sex is now illegal. But only for men. Because of all-powerful, man-hating feminism.

My expertise on drunk sex is approximately zero. My expertise on being drunk and hanging out with drunk women is higher, however. As such I can say with a certain amount of authority that the scary-ass drunk-sex-leading-to-rape-accusations shit is pretty highly exaggerated because drunk people still know what they’re doing. Someone who goes out and says, “I wanna get shitfaced and laid!” will probably then go forth and do exactly that. This is where we get stories of embarrassing drunken hookups and walks of shame. This is not where we get stories of rape.

As such, I’ll again let Amanda Marcotte take over the narrative:

Call it the Legend of the Accidental Rapist, if you will, but it’s horseshit. This is not what rape under the influence looks like. I link the Yes Means Yes post “Meet the Predators” constantly, but it’s time to do it again and keep doing it until people actually read it. Because it tells a very different, social science-and-actual-experience-backed story about rape and alcohol. Let me tell you that story:

There is a man who really likes raping women. It gets him off, the power and control he has, as well as the fear in her eyes as she realizes yes, this is really going to happen. He enjoys doing this as often as he can. But he doesn’t want to go to jail for it, nor does he want people to ostracize him socially if they discover he’s a rapist. (If nothing else, that makes it harder to find new victims!) So he attacks drunk women. He may even ply them with alcohol to get them drunker. He does this for two reasons: 1) They are easier to overpower and 2) No one believes them because they were drinking. After the rape, if the victim says she was raped, all you have to do is refer to the Legend of the Accidental Rapist, and everyone will rally to support you while dismissing the victim for being a sloppy drunk and a hysterical bitch who is too hopped up on feminist horseshit to think properly. Even better, most victims know that’s how it will go down, so they probably won’t say anything at all, leaving you to keep raping without much interference.

Amanda linked to a post called Meet the Predators in the block quote I used up there. Here it is. Go look.

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The truth, as they say, will set you free. That’s something I needed to know as a rather naïve undergrad a decade ago. Rapists prey on guys who are like I was back then, though, too. They need guys like past me to operate. It’s blatantly obvious to me now that someone who is too drunk to stand up or actually unconscious can’t consent. It’s also blatantly obvious to me that there’s a difference between someone using drunkenness to rationalize a bad decision and someone being too drunk to consent.

That, really, is the fine line that the rapists and rape apologists want to walk. “You’ll never again be able to make a drunken hookup at last call,” they say, “Because then she’ll cry rape in the morning.” That’s not where the line is drawn at all.

More importantly, it’s obvious to me that this isn’t where the line is drawn. It’s really a collection of attitudes that allow that. Primarily the idea is the old one that men are uncontrollable horndogs and women are all frigid bitches who only use sex because they want to snag a man. So when they get drunk and cry rape what they’re really saying is that you, man-who-doesn’t-understand-women, is that you didn’t pass the test and you’re about to get fucked for life by those damn predatory bitches. That, and I say this as someone who has basically zero working knowledge of how these things work, isn’t how it works.

My point is this: it’s both far more complicated than the posters I saw on the wall at WIU and far simpler. It’s more complicated in that there’s no clear line that drunken hookups = nonconsensual sex. It’s simpler in that most people are already aware of that but the people who see that as an opportunity want to blur that line and make it so that everyone who’s ever been a bit buzzed and a bit excited and heading home with someone at 2 am suddenly has to think, “Oh, shit, now I’m gonna get accused of being a rapist! I can’t have that!”

That’s where rape culture comes into play. It’s far easier to say, “Hey, let’s say this isn’t a thing and then maybe blame it on the victims for being slutty-ass bitches,” than to say, “Maybe we need to be aware of the situation and I, myself, need to be more careful.”[1]

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The fact of the matter is, at least in my experience, guys know when other guys are skeevy assholes. Ask any guy and he’ll tell you that he knows some guy who gives off that rapey vibe. They don’t use that particular term, though. They’re most likely to say something like, “I wouldn’t leave Biff alone with my girlfriend.”

Sometimes they’re just saying, “Biff is a pig who hits on every woman in sight.” Sometimes, however, they’re saying, “Biff is a sex offender list registry waiting to happen.” Generally, too, guys know the difference there. It’s really not that hard, either. Believe it or not, but women know it, too. If you as a guy who isn’t a skeevy pig, are willing to sit down and talk to the women you know about it they’ll tell you, too.

I’m going to throw this suggestion out there to all single guys who are worried about it: do so. Sit down with the women in your lives – whether they’re family, friends, or potential future sex partners – and talk to them. If you aren’t a skeevy rapist type who they instinctively avoid they’ll fucking tell you what’s going on and what guys in your social group are guys about whom they’re concerned.

It’s not quite as easy as walking up and saying, “So, who do you think is a rapist?” though. I mean, that might be a worthwhile conversation starter if everyone is worried about Biff and wants to make sure that he’s kept in check. But don’t just assume it will be that easy.

For instance, I recently ran into a female acquaintance. We were talking and I mentioned a guy we both knew. She told me that he hits on every woman he sees. That merely confirmed something I suspected about him, since the first time I met him he was making a woman I also first met that night uncomfortable with his attentions.

That said, I’ve always considered him harmless (part of that was because I watched the woman in question react to him, which was more along the lines of annoyance and pity than anything even approaching fear). He was basically that kid in high school who is so socially inept that he’ll ask every girl at the lunchroom table if she wants to go on a date with him. The conversation I had about him the other night confirmed that for me. He didn’t seem to register as a threat so much as an annoyance.

What makes the difference in the lines between the well-adjusted and socially normal not-rapists, harmless but socially maladjusted and somewhat pathetic dudes, and actual rapists is that there’s a concerted effort to blur those lines. The blurring of the lines only serves to help one of those groups. If you haven’t figured out which group it is yet, I’ll give you a hint: it’s the rapists. They have a pretty good chance of allying themselves with the harmless but socially maladjusted guys, though, because those guys might not be rapists but they’re likely to worry that someone might accuse them of being a rapist just because they’re hitting on every woman who comes in their line of sight.

I guess that, again, it gets back to my all-encompassing theory of women: they’re people, too. Treat them as such and you’ll be fine. Sometimes that means not having sex with them when they’re drunk and passed out (because, really, duh). Sometimes that means talking to them about other people you both know and making a mental note about who to keep an eye on in the future. Sometimes, and I suggest this with absolutely no flippancy whatsoever, it means discussing books or football or dogs or TV shows or whatever.

Because, again, women are people. They have actual, honest to dog interests and they might just enrich your life by sharing them with you. And that, my friends, is the best way to stop the whole rape culture bullshit. If men would stop thinking of women as nothing more than mobile vagina deployment platforms it would help everything immensely.

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[1]This, by the by, seems like something that’s also applicable to the gun control “debate” in this country. There’s a vast gulf between “outlaw drunken hookups” and “try to stop rape” that’s pretty much the same as the gulf between “ban all the guns” and “put reasonable rules in place that limit who can have guns and what kinds of guns they can own.”

It occurs to me, though, that we don’t live in a society here in America that wants to have a reasonable conversation about guns. The reasoning, such as it is, is probably pretty much the same as why we can’t seem to have a reasonable conversation about rape. A reasonable conversation, after all, might require someone, somewhere, to curtail their activities and we can’t have that as long as the person being asked to curtail their activities is part of the privileged class.

And, yes, I’m drawing a direct parallel between the gun owners who refuse to even entertain the notion that maybe there might be a time and a place to sit down and talk aobut guns as an actual integral part of the whole issue of gun violence and rapists. If anyone who’s reading this can’t see how the previous paragraph creates a reasonable space to compare the two, feel free leave a comment and expose your own lack of critical thinking skills down below.

Oh, and I’d say that asking someone to think before they attempt sexual relations with a potentially-non-consenting partner is right up there with asking someone to eat more vegetables or brush their teeth, too. It really should just be an expected act from a responsible individual. Hell, I could draw a parallel to the idiots who think that CFL lightbulbs are a break on their personal freedom. But I won't, because I don't have that kind of time.

04/06/2012

Cat Valente is one of my favorite fiction authors, mostly because, holy shit can that woman turn a phrase. I believe I've mentioned that from time to time.

The SFF corner of the internets had a blow-up last week. If you want to know what happened, Scalzi (who also had something to say on this sort of thing a while back) has the history and various weirdnesses available. Here's the basic story, though: a respected male writer took a giant dump all over the slate for the Clarke awards and the internet went into a frenzy of (mostly good-natured) craziness. Because that's what the internet does.

Valente made the point that, sadly, gets made after every one of these things happen. I don't say "sadly" because it's tired and, geez, why won't these women just shut up about it. I say "sadly" because I'm genuinely saddened that we keep having to see these things at all. I wish people could figure out that a woman who voices her own opinion isn't a bitch or a harpy, but a woman with her own goddamn opinion. I wish people could figure out that, "You deserve to be raped, you bitch," is not now, not ever, and will never, ever, ever, EVER be a correct response to anything, especially someone simply stating her opinion.

I also wish that all the men that then say that the woman in question is complaining about nothing and really should just leave everything well enough alone would do the world a favor and count the number of times random strangers have threatened to rape them for the sin of publicly stating an opinion and shut the fuck up until the reach the number, oh, say, 1. That would solve a lot of problems right there.

I’m frustrated. I’m tired of the disparity of voices, of who gets written off and who gets their blog posts discussed in The Guardian being dismally predictable. I’m tired of still having the “when men say it it’s awesome and when women say it it’s bitchy” conversation that was supposed to be sorted in 1985. Not because I have a whole bunch of horrible shit about awards that I’d like to say. I don’t. But I have to tell you that I don’t, so that you’ll think I’m a nice girl, so that I don’t come off as threatening, so that you’ll listen to what I say and not just write me off as an angry feminist…what? Bitch. Because feminist bitches are not to be listened to, don’t you know. They are not to be considered, not the way Priest was considered, even by people who disagreed, even by people who thought he went too far and too personal and too much.

It's not exactly as flowery as the Dirge for Prester John, but that'll preach...

04/04/2012

We all know what The Friend Zone is, I hope. It’s that terrible purgatory wherein you get to spend a whole bunch of time with that one member of the female gender who is, like, completely perfect for you in a making out and boobie-touching sort of way, but she just won’t let you touch her boobies and totally won’t make out with you. It’s an awful thing to behold, truly.

And we all know how one gets put into The Friend Zone. It’s when you, as the guy, say something like, “We should go on a date,” or, “You know we’re perfect for each other, right?” or you keep “accidentally” touching her boobies when you’re hanging out, and then suggest that maybe she should let you actually touch them in a non-accidental sort of way. But no matter what you do she just plain doesn’t let you touch her boobies or make out with her because she just doesn’t want to ruin your friendship.

Of course that whole thing is bullshit. She’s just trying to use you. Or keep you as a backup.[1] Or string you along out of some sort of crazy-ass sadism because women are evil, controlling bitches like that.

You know, when I put it in those terms, The Friend Zone doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. I literally cannot figure out why anyone would want to stay involved in a relationship wherein one person has been put in The Friend Zone. Obviously the woman doing the putting into The Friend Zone is some sort of using, controlling bitch, so why would her poor victim even want to touch her boobies?[2] She’s obviously controlling him with her feminine wiles and the poor sap has been brainwashed by boobies.[3] Boy, howdy, does it ever suck to be that guy.

Wait, no. That still makes no goddamn sense.

Okay, let me try to figure this out in some way that does make sense. Okay, what about this: let’s take a hypothetical approach wherein the female in question really does want to be friends and the male in question is a whiny little dipshit. Then let’s see where this whole thing goes. Conceptually, of course. Theoretically, even. Because we all know that this scenario is, like, totally impossible in reality.

Let’s say that the woman in question genuinely doesn’t want to date right now. This could be a general thing and she’s totally off the dating scene. It could also be a specific thing and she doesn’t want to date the guy in question but, like, if Orlando Bloom showed up and said, “Ya wanna go for coffee?” she’d be all, “Yes, Legolas, oh, god, yes.” It’s not likely, but, hey, it could happen.

Let’s ask the question, “What could possibly going through a woman’s head when she puts some poor guy into The Friend Zone?” This, of course, depends on any number of factors. We must consider them.

There are the general environmental factors. Has she recently experienced a big life changed, including a career change, a death in the family, a cross-country move, or something similar? Is she currently engaged in some sort of long-term self-improvement project, including going back to school, trying to write the great American novel, putting more of her time into charitable giving, or finally learning how to make those awesome pastries she’s always wanted to learn to make? Is something taking up a shitload of her time, such as finishing her Masters while working full-time, a huge project at work, an ailing family member, or a recently purchased house that needs a lot of work? Has she recently gotten out of a long-term relationship? Has she recently gotten out of a short but intense relationship? Has she experienced a string of bad relationships with guys who suck? Is she, for that matter, currently in a relationship?

Once we get through the general environmental factors we need to ask specific factors. Does she tend to date dumb jock types while you happen to be a pointy-headed intellectual type? Are you pretty much her only friend and confidant? Does she happen to be best friends with your sister?

These are all valid, nay, important questions to consider. This list is also far, far from exhaustive. Chances are that these or similar questions are all part of the mental calculus a woman puts into a potential relationship.

Guys, on the other hand, pretty much only ask two questions:

1. “Is she hot?”

2. “Is she single?”[4]

If the answers are, “Yes,” and, “Yes,” respectively, then there shouldn’t be any roadblocks in the way. Any woman who does put up a road block, then, is being some sort of scheming bitch who is trying to destroy the guy in question. Because, really, what else does a relationship need?

The problem with this difference in approach is pretty simple: the guy signals that he doesn’t actually give a shit about the supposed object of his affection. If it’s only worthwhile to be friends with someone if she’ll make out with you and let you touch her boobies, then that person has been reduced to tongue, lips, and boobies. It’s really that simple.

As such, the guy who sits around and bitches about being relegated to The Friend Zone sends the message that he is not and never will be boyfriend material. Because, really, why would anyone want to date someone who doesn’t actually give a shit about them? I suppose that there are women out there who are like that, though. So maybe Captain Friend Zone needs to go find one of them. Chances are he’ll be doing the object of his attention a great service if he does.

For the record, I’m not saying any of these things as someone who hasn’t fucked this up. I totally have. I’ve simply made it a point to learn from my mistakes.

Amy and I dated for about three months, then spent the next year and a half or so in this kinda-sorta pseudo relationship thingy that was bad for everyone involved. For whatever reason she decided it wasn’t going to work and then tried to Friend Zone me, with a certain level of success, most of which had to be qualified by me pointing out that I did the passive-aggressive douchebag thing for most of that time. After we stopped talking I realized from time to time that I actually missed her. It wasn’t that I missed sitting around thinking about how great it would be if she let me touch her boobies. It was that I missed having her around as someone to talk to and as someone who I knew would know Thing X about Subject Y that I, personally, knew fuck all about or would want to talk about Subject Z that I knew most other people I know couldn't be arsed to discuss. Ergo, I hadn’t broken up with someone, I’d lost a friend. I missed that particular friend and there was no getting her back.

Meanwhile, at a later, non-disclosed point in time I met a woman I came to value as a friend. She was in a relationship when I met her. I eventually figured out that she was actually someone I would date in a heartbeat if the opportunity presented itself.

Eventually she broke up with the guy, which I considered a good move on her part. It wasn’t because I knew I could then make my move, but because she wasn’t happy and I wanted her to be happy because she totally deserved to be happy. The fact is that by the time that happened our friendship had progressed to the point where I didn’t want to potentially fuck it up by making a pass and finding out she totally wasn’t interested.

The fact of the matter is that I know the standard guy response to that situation is, “Ask her out. Who cares about the consequences?”

I do, that’s who. And I care because in the final analysis I ended up being more unhappy that I didn’t let Amy Friend Zone me than that she didn’t let me play with her boobies and make out with her and shit.

Turns out the dreaded Friend Zone isn’t necessarily such a bad place to be.

---------------------------

[1]I originally wrote this as “Or keep you as a backpack,” which would be really, really weird.

[2]I mean, other than the obvious reason. Boobies are fun to touch, after all.

[3]Brainwashed By Boobies is also the name of The Curb Tacos’ debut album. Out June 12th.

04/03/2012

It's because, in males more so than females, the sex drive is completely detached from the rest of the personality. The part of the male brain that worries about job security or money or social reputation or legal consequences has almost no veto power over the sex drive. You've heard guys say they were "thinking with their dick" or "I was thinking with the little brain" or "I took an order from Captain Bonerhelmet." That's what they're referring to. [Emphasis mine]

I have a huge problem with the line of thought in the bolded sentence. My problem is that it’s in an article that’s ostensibly written as a defense of women against the predation of men, but that single sentence negates pretty much every good thing that the article could have said (which, sadly, were few and far between). See, by offering an awful and convenient evo-devo explanation the author totally takes all responsibility for men’s behavior out of the hands of men. Don’t believe me?

Science doesn't seem to totally understand why the "base urges" part of the brain reacts differently in men. Maybe it's just a matter of having 10 times as much testosterone in their system, or maybe society has trained us to be like this, or maybe we're all spoiled children. My theory is that evolution needs males who will stay horny even in times of crisis or distress, and thus cuts off the brain's ability to tamp down those urges. Whatever -- nailing down the cause isn't the point. [Emphasis mine]

Um, yes, as a matter of fact, nailing down the cause should be the point. It should be the entire goddamn point. And just dismissing male tendencies in the horniness department as “men need to be horny during distress” is fuck stupid. You know what happens to be a really good way of getting your dumb, horny ass killed? Stopping to rub one out while being chased across the savannah by a hungry lion, that’s what. You know what’s a really bad idea during one of those “times of distress” that might include things like “famine” and “drought” and “spending a year stuck in a city besieged by ravening hordes of Huns?” Bringing more hungry mouths into the world, that’s what.

I, personally, would think that the more logical evolutionary developmental advantage within humanity would go to the one who can control his sexuality. Yes, there’s the whole propagation of the species through survival of the fittest and wider dissemination of the genes is a total Darwinian concept that makes perfect sense. But humanity has something that your average mayfly, cuttlefish, or prairie dog lacks: the actual intelligence necessary to engage in long-term thinking. Actions, after all, have consequences. My dog doesn’t necessarily have the capacity to understand that, but I sure as shit do.

That, for the record, is pretty much how society works. We have laws and cultural mores for a reason. Some of those laws might be stupid. Some of those cultural mores might be outdated. But the underlying concept of laws and mores is essential to the proper functioning of human society. So if you take fifty-percent of humanity, throw your arms up, and say, “Fuck, I don’t know what to do, they’re evolutionarily incapable of understanding consequences,” then YOU. ARE. NOT. HELPING.

It’s as simple as that.

That’s the problem with this entire exercise, though. The article attempts to say that it’s somehow “society” or “evolution” that causes men to treat women like shit, then passively says, “Well, what’re ya gonna do, boys will be boys, after all. We can’t be trusted around boobies.”

Step one is to say that, no, it’s not okay. Step two is to hold that line. Step three is to smack any whiny, over-privileged twit who tries to go over that line without consequences. Step four is to smack anyone who lets him get away with it.

It’s really not that complicated. This isn’t to say it’s particularly simple, as there’s a lot of inertia and unexamined privilege that must be overcome in order to create real, lasting, necessary change. For the most part it should be an issue of changing mores. Make it unacceptable to be a douchebag. Make it clear that certain actions are sexual assault. Then, when someone crosses that line, don’t let him say, “She was asking for it.”

This is usually when someone comes out with the ol’, “But what about those crazy bitches who accuse guys of rape because they’re, y’know, crazy-ass bitches?” To be honest, this is problematic. I have no doubt that there are women somewhere in this world who will run around all willy-nilly claiming that every single guy who’s ever looked at them is engaging in sexual assault.[1] This, unfortunately, is a problem we have to deal with all the time in society.

What’s to stop my neighbor from accusing me of stealing his laptop? What’s to stop someone walking down the street from calling the cops and claiming I tried to run her over with my car? Nothing. Nothing at all. This is the risk of living within a society.

Accusations of crimes related to sex are also far, far more complicated and fraught with social peril than accusations of property theft. In most cases it’s literally a case of the word of one against the word of another without any witnesses. That’s truly problematic and does open well-meaning people up to spurious and false accusations that they cannot disprove.

The solution to this seemingly intractable problem, though, is not to simply allow one half of the population to get away with anything they want because, fuck, man, what’re you supposed to do? That’s the world we live in right now. Boys will be boys, after all. They can’t be expected to consider the consequences.[2] Besides, she should have known better than to put herself in a position where those uncontrolled and uncontrollable boys would see her and she sure as hell should have known better than to have a history of being sexually active. Really, if a woman has had one penis inside of her then that means she wants to have every other penis inside of her at any given time, regardless of whether she knows the guy or likes him or wants to have sex at this particular moment.

That doesn’t sound fair to me. And if it sounds fair to you, chances are you’re some sort of MRA and/or PUA douchebag and, quite frankly, the only solution to that is castration with a rusty X-Acto knife. Sorry, bro, you know what they say, “Life’s a bitch, then you marry one.” Har-har.

David Wong does try to avoid the exceedingly negative implications of his argument:

No, this doesn't excuse anything. Obviously, "She was asking for it!" is still a bullshit rape defense. All I'm saying is when you see guys actually get annoyed or angry at the sight of a girl showing too much skin, or if you see them eager to degrade or humiliate the girls at the strip club, this is why. It's probably why some Muslims make their women cover themselves head to toe.

While the disclaimer at the start is nice, the rest of the thing is pretty fucking stupid. It makes sense if you genuinely believe that men are uncontrollable horndogs, I suppose. But, again, all this does is say that it’s all the woman’s fault. Humiliation, abuse, and strictly enforced dress codes are not an issue of men recognizing their limitations, either. They are the artifacts of control, plain and simple.

And that is why we need to change up the cultural mores and stop saying that men can’t be expected to control themselves or consider the consequences of their actions. It’s not some strange, amorphous “society” putting these limitations on women and allowing men to run about in a blissful fog, free of any consequences of their actions. It’s men. You know how I know that? Because I happen to know that men are in society, men have most of the power in society, and the way society is formulated is strangely skewed to give men more power and privilege than women.

So, yeah, that’s all I have to say about that for the moment. Stay tuned, though, since I’m going to veer off of the David Wong article and take all a y’alls into a place I’m sure you don’t want to go: The Friend Zone.

-

[1]Seriously, I knew someone in college who was a social work major and one day, out of fucking nowhere, put this big, long diatribe out (on Facebook, if I recall) about how every man in the world was a rapist and not to be trusted. Except her current boyfriend, of course. She also accused me of being a tool of the Devil and attempting to undermine her once because she got it into her head that I had been pulling the strings on something that I had only a tangential connection to. There is little doubt in my mind that, yes, she could end up accusing some dude of rape because he bumped into her on the sidewalk.

[2]Some people, of course, genuinely can’t think past the action to the consequences. I do not think that this is or should be thought of as a normative male modality. I think that your average male is completely and totally capable of controlling himself, but we as a society have not given enough incentive to do so. I’ll also note that the primary drivers of the laws and law enforcement in our society are men. Strange coincidence, that…

03/30/2012

[I don’t do this very often, but this post needs a trigger warning, since it covers a topic that’s impossible to handle without discussing rape.]

I was having curb tacos across the street from the Double Door last Friday with a buddy. Curb tacos, for the record, are regular tacos consumed while sitting on a curb. They aren’t a venereal disease and there’s nothing sexual about the whole thing.[1] It might be a bit soggy, but it’s not sordid.

The Double Door, for those who don’t know, is a Chicago music institution located at the intersection of Milwaukee, North, and Damen in the extremely gentrified Bucktown/Wicker Park area of Chicago. The entire area is Asian fusion restaurants and trendy bars and Starbucks and various things that are magnets for childless people with disposable incomes in their late 20s and early 30s. Last Friday was a bit misty, but it was warm enough that there was a lot of foot traffic and a whole lot of people who apparently thought it was the middle of goddamn summer and dressed accordingly. The upshot of this means there was a veritable smorgasbord of two things: attractive women and short skirts.

So my buddy and I were having a conversation that should have cost me a man card or three, since it was me articulating my various feelings of inadequacy as a human being.[2] He kept stopping to check out women who were walking across the street with their nice legs and shapely buttocks. He also, in the time-honored tradition of men everywhere, made sure to point them out to me.

My answer was always some variation on, “So, what?”

At one point he got mad at me and said, “So why do you keep doing this? Do you think you’re more mature than me or something?”

The answer to that question is “No,” which I tried to articulate, but probably didn’t do so well, since his question didn’t make any sense to me. It would be like if I showed up with my new Mazda and my buddy was like, “That’s nice for you, I guess, but I prefer Hondas,” and I was all, “Why are you telling me my car sucks? Is it because you don’t like gray cars?” I couldn’t answer the question because it wasn’t applicable to the situation. He thought I was judging him. In truth I just didn’t want to be bothered.

Attractive women are nice to look at and all. I’ll accept that premise because I wholeheartedly believe it. For me, however – and this might be something that genuinely only applies to me, I don’t know – seeing an attractive woman isn’t that big of a deal. I could see the most attractive woman in the world walk past me right now and by this time tomorrow I will have forgotten that it happened and gone on to something else. For me it’s not a question of maturity or self-control or superiority so much as it’s a question of utility. If I’m trying to have a conversation and maintain a train of thought someone stopping me to say, “Hey, look at that ass!” isn’t helping.

There’s also a functional point to be made: I’ve made it a point to not think of women as a nice set of legs or a curvy ass or a sweet rack. Does that mean that I can’t see and appreciate such physical features? No, not at all. What it does mean, though, is that I’ve basically deprogrammed my brain from being constantly and casually distracted by the presence of a nice set of legs or a shapely ass. There’s pretty much zero chance I’ll end up striking up a long-term, meaningful relationship with a woman crossing the street half a block down, so I can safely not give a rat’s ass about her shapely ass.

Does that make me weird? Probably. Does it make me more mature than other men? I’m going to say no, since I don’t think that maturity has anything to do with it. That’s a completely different dimension of human attitude than a simple mature/immature continuum.

And yea, verily, do we reach the part of David Wong’s Cracked piece that pissed me the hell off and convinced me to finally pull a bunch of disjointed thoughts together and write about them: “#3. We Think You're Conspiring With Our Boners to Ruin Us.” Um, yeah.

This is a fairly common idea. Way back in the day Amy articulated it to me as, “Women know that if you can get a guy’s blood flowing to the little head he doesn’t have enough to think with the big one.” It’s common knowledge, basically. It’s not even like the idea is regarded as a moral failure or an issue of immaturity. It’s just a value-neutral fact, like the wetness of water or blueness of sky or eastness of sunrise. Give a dude a boner and he won’t be able to think anymore. The goes with the attendant idea that all a woman has to do is flash a little thigh and said dude will get himself a boner.

Okay, so, this is conventional wisdom. It’s generally accepted and considered part of the overall male-female interaction and everyone is just kind of okay with it. Because that means that women get to control men through sex and boys get to be boys and we can all just live happily ever after. Until it comes time to take someone to court on rape charges and everyone shakes their head and says, “Well she shouldn’t have been wearing that short skirt. She was asking for it.”

Then it becomes a problem. But only for those sluts who really should know better, anyway. But that’s okay, too, because obviously they were going out in search of a guy to put his penis into them, so if they were planning on having a penis in them isn’t one penis as good as another, even if the one that happened to end up there belonged to a guy who grabbed her in a hallway and shoved her up against a wall? I mean, seriously. Why should she be picky, since she got exactly what she was after?

And, yeah, David Wong goes all the fuck over this territory, in spite of his protestations to the contrary.

First, you need to understand something about the unique love/hate relationship men have with their penises.

Do you remember that story about police having to free a guy who got his dick stuck while humping a pool filter? Or that other guy who got stuck humping a park bench, or the other guy who got stuck humping a picnic table? Or that judge who got caught jerking off while on the bench listening to testimony?

I, for one, do not have a love/hate relationship with my penis. I neither love nor hate my penis. And I can assure you that I have never gotten anywhere close to getting my dick stuck in a park bench or a public pool because I’m not a fucking dipshit who can’t control myself. I would also be willing to bet that better than 95% of the male gender would completely and totally agree with me on that one. There is as much of a gulf between “a guy who owns a penis” and “a guy who owns a penis and plays with it in public” as there is between “a guy who owns a knife” and “a guy who has stabbed a hobo to death.”

Simply having something that someone else has used in a way that’s frowned upon by society doesn’t mean you have to use it in that same way. The story about the guy who gets penis stuck in vacuum attachment is going to get a hell of a lot more play than the million or so stories every day of guys who used a vacuum and managed to not stick their dicks in the various hose-based accessories. It’s kind of the same thing as a story of kids getting kidnapped get a lot more play than the stories of kids who don’t get kidnapped. Children are, at least according to the statistics I’ve seen, safer now than they were during the golden ages of years past when kids played in the streets all day and night and befriended magic hoboes who taught them important life lessons and told them where to find secret hobo treasure. But all we hear about are the kids who get abducted, so people assume that there’s some creepy, candy-besotted stranger with a windowless Astro van around every corner.

I guess my point is this: I’ve never seen a dude fucking a picnic table or humping a pool filter. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Also it’s fun to talk about hoboes.

You see this type of story come up a lot -- check your local police blotter. And they all have something in common: They're all guys.

Seriously, do a Google search for "masturbating in public library." Notice something in common with all of those stories? They're all dudes. Obviously I'm not saying women don't pleasure themselves (every single study would prove me a liar); I'm saying that men are far, far more likely to engage in extremely high-risk masturbation in public. They're more likely to do it at work, and they're more likely to do it in situations where they could go to jail.

No, it's not some rare, weird exhibitionist fetish, either. It's that they can't even wait the couple of hours it'd take to do it safely at home.

I can’t believe that I have to be the one to explain this, but here goes: women are fully capable of masturbating in public. Chances are that they do it, too. Possibly as often as men. Women, however, have a distinct technological advantage in the public masturbation arms race: they don't have penises.

I’m given to understand – and any women who happen to stop by can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, since god knows I have absolutely no business acting like I know anything whatsoever about the secret functioning of ladyparts – that it’s entirely possible for a woman to stimulate herself without drawing much attention to the act whatsoever. If I’m correct in my understanding it requires a hell of a lot less work than whipping out a six-inch meat log and furiously stroking it for thirty seconds. That’s kind of an attention-getter. And it’s rather hard to disguise as some other, more innocent activity.

All that aside, especially if it turns out I’m wrong (although, really, what the hell else are kegel exercises for? Again, I have ZERO expertise in the area of ladyparts. And I’m pretty sure that that’s gonna cost me a man card. Here, have a dozen. They’re good for ten cents off a coffee at your local Caribou franchise as long as you get the daily trivia question right), what the fuck does, “Some dude decided to stick his dick in a picnic table,” have to do with, “Women try to control men through their penises?” I don’t know if anyone else has ever noticed this, but while a woman can be many things, a picnic table isn’t one.[3] Let’s go see what the reason is that these two totally unrelated things are absolutely related, shall we?

It's because, in males more so than females, the sex drive is completely detached from the rest of the personality. The part of the male brain that worries about job security or money or social reputation or legal consequences has almost no veto power over the sex drive. You've heard guys say they were "thinking with their dick" or "I was thinking with the little brain" or "I took an order from Captain Bonerhelmet." That's what they're referring to.

Bullshit.

Bull. Shit.

Bull. Fucking. Shit.

That’s the old…

Wait, hold on, I don’t think you got the point yet.

Buuuuuuuuuuullllllll. Sheeeeeeeeit.

There we go. Anyway, back to the post.

That’s the old “boys will be boys” excuse. Us poor men are led about by our penises and just can’t do a damn thing about it. So, really, when you think about it, we should get a cookie and a pat on the head for every time we don’t beat off in public or rape a woman who’s just trying to get a $20 at the ATM. Because men just can’t be expected to think about the consequences, like when we buy $3,000 TVs when we’ve got an upcoming down payment on a house to think about.

And, hey, lookit that. I'm up to four pages and I’m not even warmed up yet. Looks like this one’s about to become a two-parter.

Sorry.

-----------------------

[1]That said, I now want to go to Fort Worth and sit on the sidewalk on Berry Street across from the TCU campus, since getting some Fuzzy’s curb tacos sounds totally dirty.

[2]I have several. If you’d like to hear them it will cost you a curb taco. And, yes, I’ve decided to make “curb taco” an integral part of my lexicon.

[3]Unless you’re at one of those crazy-ass sushi places that serves the food on a naked lady. At that point a woman is pretty much a picnic table.

I’ve got a friend who will regularly stop in the middle of something he’s talking about and say, “I know I’ll have to turn in my man card if I say this, but…” or, “Well I guess I have to turn in my man card,” or something to that effect. My response to that is always, “The man card thing is bullshit, what’s on your mind?”

That should always and forever be the response to anything involving the terms “man” and “card” placed next to each other. The idea of “manhood” as espoused in the man card concept is annoying when it’s something that someone else tries to push. It’s insidious when it becomes a form of self regulation. This is something with which I am all too familiar.

For those who haven’t been around these here parts much, I grew up in the Evangelical Christian community. Or whatever you call it. Because I grew up in the Evangelical church I am incredibly familiar with self-regulating behavior modification. If you tell someone enough that “you’re not a good Christian if you do/don’t do X,” then threaten them with punishment for breaking that rule you can eventually convince them to watch their own behavior. This pretty much explains the weird obsession Christianity seems to have with masturbation and using swear words.[1] The penalty for not watching your behavior in Christianity, of course, is that you’ll go to hell. Because Baby Jesus is super interested in how often you jack off and say, “Fuck.” In fact, he’s so interested that he watches you do it. All the time.

Apparently Baby Jesus is a perv.

The penalty for not behaving in a manly manner, of course, is that you won’t get laid. This is why you, as a man who, because you are a man and men want to get laid, must always and forever and consciously be a man. And how does a man know he is being a man? When he’s behaving in a manly manner, of course. Behaving in a manly manner is mostly a matter of always holding tight to one’s man card.[2]

Of course being properly manly isn’t as easy to define as being properly Christian. The Bible says that all you need to do to be a good Christian is to pray the “Sinner’s Prayer” and make sure you don’t swear, smoke, masturbate, vote for a Democrat, or approve of anyone who is gay or has abortions.[3] There is no simple manual to tell us in short, declarative statements what it means to be a proper man, unfortunately.

This, of course, means that we must identify a “man” according to what a man should not be. Since the world consists of two and only two types of people, namely “men” and “women,” we simply have to figure out what a woman is in order to figure out what a man should be. Simple, right? Let’s try it.

Women are emotional and like talking about their feelings. That means that if you, as a man, talk about feelings, or even acknowledge that you have feeling, you are being a woman. That is a man card violation.

Women never want sex for pleasure, only for control. That means that if you, as a man, ever don’t want sex or exercise any control over your sexual impulses, you're being a woman. That’s a man card.

Women like poetry and art and the opera and that sort of boring bullshit. That means that if you, as a man, want to go to a museum or really like “The Marriage of Figaro," you are being a woman. Man card.

See how easy that is? All you have to do is ask yourself no matter what you’re doing, “Is this what a woman would do?” If your answer is, “Yes,” then you know that you are, by extension, being a woman. If you’re being a woman then that means you’re not being a man. So you might as well just hand in that man card and slip on skirt over that lacy pair of panties you just put on, bitch.

These posts are, ostensibly, a response to the ideas David Wong put into this piece at Cracked. More specifically, this post is my reaction to “#2: We Feel Like Manhood Was Stolen from Us at Some Point.” He makes half a point, then makes a half-assed refutation of the argument he’s supposedly dealing with and then he just kind of…stops. This is a huge problem.

See, every single male can remember the first time, when he was 5 or 6 years old, he showed his penis to a stranger and everybody started freaking the hell out. He can remember the first time he got in trouble for hitting somebody, for peeing in public, for trying to jump off some high object or set something on fire. All of the core male urges, all the suggestions whispered to us by Darth Penis, all of it gets us in trouble.

And, when we get nostalgic for the past, we always dress it up in some ridiculous fantasy like 300, where everybody is shirtless and screaming and hacking things with swords. We are fed this idea that at one time, this is how the world was -- all of these impulses that have been getting us grounded and sent to detention from kindergarten on used to be not only allowed, but celebrated.

I will admit that my reaction to this is mostly anecdote and only my anecdote. I’ll further admit that if my experience is as reasonably universal as I think it is, the plural of anecdote is still not data. But I have a really hard time with this entire line of argument.

The primary problem is that I have never in my life showed my penis to a stranger. Hell, I’ve managed to avoid showing my penis to close confidants. So there’s that. And no one wants to see me running around shirtless and pretending to be King Leonidas, not even me. Also, I got sent to detention exactly once that I can recall. So perhaps I was simply better behaved than your average boy.[4]

I don’t think that’s the case, though. I had a lot of friends who never did their best Calvin or Dennis the Menace impressions, at least not in my presence. I can’t see any of my male friends trying to imitate the dudes on Jackass for any reason. For that matter, I’m pretty sure that most of my friends think the guys on Jackass are complete and total idiots.

More than that, while I have hit someone and gotten in trouble for it, I didn’t take the “getting in trouble” part as a lesson that my manhood had been taken from me. I took it as a lesson that actions have consequences. Does that mean that I, as a fourth grader, was smarter and more mature than your average adult male? Apparently yes, if the internet is to be believed.

I don’t think I was, though. I think that we’re supposed to believe that all boys are trouble makers. I think we’re supposed to believe that all men are simply boys who have grown hair in strange and fascinating places. I think we’re supposed to believe, in short, that “boys will be boys” and, by extension, “men will be boys.” If boys are boys and men are boys, then, who is the adult in the room?

Right, the woman. Hence the next bit:

And then at some point, women took it all away.

A once-great world of heroes and strength and warriors and cigars and crude jokes has been replaced by this world of grumpy female supervisors looming over our cubicle to hand us a memo about sending off-color jokes via email. Yes, that entire narrative is a grossly skewed and self-serving version of how society actually evolved. It doesn't matter.

The result is a combination of frustration and humiliation and powerlessness that makes us want to get it back in the only way we know how: with petty, immature acts of meanness.

I’m insulted by this whole thing. Sure, he makes the lame refutation that “that entire narrative is a grossly skewed and self-serving version of how society actually evolved,” but at no point does he explain how it’s skewed or why. He just leaves it there. “We blame women for making us be adults. We shouldn’t, but we do, so we act like assholes.” Well okay, then. Let’s just wander away and see what’s going on over there, then.

Or, y’know, let’s not. There’s something I don’t remember ever having or being involved in. That something is “a once-great world of heroes and strength and warriors and cigars and crude jokes.” Where is that world? Who lives in that world? And why, pray tell, is it so great in the first place? And when and why and how did “grumpy female supervisors” take it away? And what does sending off-color jokes via email have to do with any of this? And is it possible for me to write more sentences that start with “And” and end with a question mark?

Apparently we don’t need to get rid of man cards as a concept. We need to sit down with the male gender and have a long talk about the importance of personal responsibility. It’s pretty self-evident, at least to me, that it’s a bad idea to take your penis out in public, to hit people, and to send off-color jokes via company email. There’s probably a policy about that in the HR manual somewhere. This realization that actions have consequences shouldn’t ever be a matter of saying, “Man, so-and-so is such a buzzkill.” It should be a part of growing up.[5]

This is the important lesson I’ve learned: women don’t kill fun. Life kills fun. Actions have consequences and it does absolutely no good to say to women, “Waaaa, you’re trying to ruin my fun.”

The upshot here is that I am about to be 31 years old. I’m also about to be buying a house. I drive a 2010 Mazda 6. I have a bunch of really fun toys. My estimated monthly budget is a few hundred dollars lower than my monthly income and I’ve managed to do all of that partially by being fortunate, but also by not buying $3000 TVs just because I’ve got that kind of money lying around in my bank account.

I’ve managed to make these things happen because I do not give a flying shit about being a man. I am far more concerned with being an adult. My self-image as a man is a secondary concern.

That’s really what the whole man card thing is, too. It’s an issue of crafting an image. The crazy thing about it is that the enforcers of that image aren’t even women, either. Watch one of those Miller Lite man card commercials. Watch that episode of Scrubs where the man cards are a plot point. Notice who issues or revokes the man cards. I’ll give you a hint: it’s not the women.

It’s actually a neat trick when you think about it. Men get to enforce orthodoxy and create a hierarchy, with the person who dictates who loses a man card placing himself as the alpha male. And then they get to blame the whole thing on those mean, meddling women.

Meanwhile, I’ve never heard a woman demand a guy’s man card. But I think I’ll have to deal with that in a different post.

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[1]True story: I went to see Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers at the fantastic Gruene Hall outside of New Braunfels, TX during June of 2010. I had just gotten my iPhone and was using the standard notepad app to take notes. The standard notepad app had a terrible habit I had discovered that very weekend of randomly erasing notes. It was awesome. I was trying to keep track of the setlist during the show and sometime around song 12 I popped the note app open and discovered that it had erased everything but the opening song.

This pissed me off, so I did what everyone does in this situation and complained on Facebook. My status incorporated a couple of four-letter words. Because, y’know, I was pissed. And somewhat soused. And I’ve been using four-letter words since the fifth grade.

The next morning I had a response from one of my former youth group leaders that started off with, “Nice swear words.” He then followed up with the ever-so-useful advice to get a completely different phone on the Sprint network. Because, shit, who doesn’t want to break their just-signed AT&T contract and trade in their month old iPhone 3GS for some random phone some dude suggested based on a problem with a single app? So, basically, the entire response was massively useless. I believe my response was a swift de-friending. Also an eventual installation of Evernote, which works beautifully.

Incidentally, when I traded in my 3GS for my Motorola Atrix 2 last month I got the Android Evernote app, signed in, and all of my notes were right there. But that’s neither here nor there.

But you don't want to hear about my app usage habits. The point is that someone felt the need to police my speech based on his standards of what counts as correct language. This is something Christians do a lot, especially in debate with non-Christians. They think that it proves some sort of point and that they are more moral because they don’t say “shit.”

[2]Which is not to be confused with a penis. This is not a veiled penis reference.

[3]The Modern American Christian translation of the Bible, of course. This is the Bible that’s always cited by a Christian prefacing a statement with, “The Bible says…”

[4]I have taken to referring to my “tragically un-misspent youth.”

[5]I was at Fry’s two weeks ago looking for a TV as part of my “create a home office” thing. When I lived in Texas my desk was in the back corner of my living room, which meant that if I wanted to watch TV while on my computer I just turned on my TV. It suddenly occurred to me a few weeks ago that I wouldn’t be able to do that anymore, so I either needed to get a third TV or not have a TV in the bedroom. Either idea was equally valid, but since the whole house buying process has dragged on forever and ever I had some extra cash so I decided to see what was available, especially since it’s the time of year with TV makers sell off last year’s models to make way for the new shit. I was just looking for a 26” or 32” TV. Nothing big. But I found myself standing in front of a 70” Sharp Aquos thinking, “That’s awesome. I could get it as my main TV, then move my 37” to the bedroom and my 32” to my office and BOOM. The TV was, like, $3,000, which isn’t that big of a deal in comparison to my current available resources. So, yes, I easily could have purchased a 70” TV that day. But then I wouldn’t have had as much money for things I need, like new carpet or paint or if it turns out the furnace in the house is on its last legs or to simply have spare cash lying around in case I need it for something next year. Hell, I know I’ll be buying a new stove sooner or later, probably sooner. Is a 70” TV more fun than a stove? Yes. Is a working stove more necessary than a 70” TV? Hell, yes.

And for those who care about such things: I ended up spending $380 for a 32” Samsung LED TV at HH Gregg. That’s, like, $50 less than the really good deal I got on my 32” Samsung LCD TV in spring of 2010. TVs is cheap these days.